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Morgan White loses an hour.

spt87 said:
If local radio is not really local or live then there are some good podcasts out there and of course for music numerous options. For news, in my smallish town a guy running around with a camera posting on a website and facebook is actually close to having better news coverage than the local, corporate conglomerate owned newspaper and radio stations. There was a hostage/standoff situation Monday morning with a huge police/swat response which impacted my son who lives next door so I wanted to learn more. Guess who the only one with coverage of it was - it wasn't the paper, not the iHeart owned News/Talk station or even the locally owned radio stations. The guy with the camera had them all beat.
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I'm involved day to day with a locally owned station besides outside my full time job... and the answer isnt always live live live. The morning show is live, then middays and afternoons are tracked. I do afternoons

When we last got some numbers, our mom and pop standalone beat out every single other station in Time spent listing by 2 to 4x.

I'm up in Alaska, but i regularly go in and update a VT when theres severe weather, road closures.. or some other important something going on in the community
 
TheBigA said:
There's an assumption that this is strictly a programming problem. If the programming was better, the audience would magically become bigger and younger. That doesn't always happen. They're facing this situation in a lot of places. Radio companies want to continue to keep the lights on, but the advertisers aren't there, and there is no alternate revenue stream. You take what you can get, and in this case, that means infomercials. Infomercials are the last resort, after all other options have been exhausted. They stick them in fringe time so not to alienate the core audience in drive time. But there will come a day.
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Infomercials are the last resort, but a common practice at IHeart
 
How many weekend shows on WRKO are local host in studio live ?

I would bet that most of their stuff is paid placement, and the re-runs of the daytime hosts are just filler until they can sell those time slots to Colon Blow or some other product....
 
I realize that radio is a business. The days of broadcasting for the
public interest, convenience or necessity" along with turning a profit is a fond memory. Years ago, I made a nice commission from Rubino and Liang and a few other financial planners. I could have sold most of the weekends to infomercial producers but at one point our GM decided that loading up any hour we could sell to a paid programmer would eventually hurt our numbers.

Cutting an hour from what I believe is the only other local talk program besides Dan Rea to run yet another financial planner seems greedy to me. If Morgan White was on last week at 9:00pm when I tuned in then BZ would be on my car radio Sunday morning and I probably would have continued to listen at home and BZ would have been on my radio when I woke up Sunday morning.
.
 
vmorrison99 said:
If Morgan White was on last week at 9:00pm when I tuned in then BZ would be on my car radio Sunday morning and I probably would have continued to listen at home and BZ would have been on my radio when I woke up Sunday morning.
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And if that had happened, you would have woken up Sunday to hear financial planning with Ric Edelman. Followed by another financial show hosted by Soledad O'Brien. And if you traveled to NYC and listened to WCBS, you would have heard similar shows. And if you were in Phoenix listening to KTAR on Sundays, you'd hear a lot of the same. That's what you hear over the weekends on news stations from coast to coast, including WSB Atlanta. It doesn't matter who owns the station. It's what they do.

These financial infomercials are the price people pay to get daily all-news radio in major markets. This was not the case 10 years ago, but it's a fact now. It's a basic simple financial reality. So far, they've managed to restrict the infomercials to the weekends. But in another 5 years, that may change. It won't be long before you hear them on the classic hits stations. They already are on the oldies stations. Nobody wants to do this. They have no other alternative. The financial shows are better than the medical shows.

Radio needs another revenue stream. Something that isn't on the air. That's really the only solution. David Field basically said as much during a conference this past week. Advertising is drying up. Expensive formats with live local staffs are hard to pay for. Thirty second spots are not going to do it anymore.
 
TheBigA said:
They're a common practice on stations that mainly appeal to over 55 audience regardless of owner. Audacy runs them on WCBS 880.

Bonneville runs them on all-news KTAR in Phoenix


Everyone likes to bash iHeart, but other companies do the same thing. You won't hear infomercials on iHeart music stations.
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Bonneville's KTAR is NOT ALL News.
the Iheart owned stations are a cookie cutter waste.
As long as they take no chances, fire good talent, narrow playlists, run the same boring shows in many cities, and cut down on, or get rid of all local programming, I will bash them, and I will gladly waste my time correcting a cheerleader like yourself
 
inorm99 said:
Bonneville's KTAR is NOT ALL News.
the Iheart owned stations are a cookie cutter waste.
As long as they take no chances, fire good talent, narrow playlists, run the same boring shows in many cities, and cut down on, or get rid of all local programming, I will bash them, and I will gladly waste my time correcting a cheerleader like yourself
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The acknowledgment that you are wasting your time is very well articulated!
 
"non traditional revenue streams"

It is all about the Benjamin's folks.

The days of looking at programming as some sacred art not to be tampered with are long gone.

But the listeners will tune out ..... nope they don't care.

We went down that path years ago with Kars 4 Questionable Charities ads, Colon Blow supplements, boner pills, any one of a thousand "this product is not intended to treat any disease yada yada yada" products, you name it ..... Folgers is not buying radio, Colgate is not buying radio, insert the name of a brand that was once prominent on the radio here and chances are they are gone.

If the check clears, the spot runs... and sometimes that isn't the case... one of those Colon Blow companies around the turn of the century went t*ts up owing radio stations millions of dollars for spots that had already run.

Remember the days when a BZ news reader would never be heard doing a "live read" for a product or service? It is beneath us! News People don't do that! Well guess what, they are doing it now aren't they.

the content below is from KRUD dot Com. Brian Gregory Wilson did a great job on that site! And it has not been updated in 20 years.

toon187.jpg



"Sales will sell anything if there is a dollar to be made. They don't care what the product is, how bad the commercial is, how repulsive it might sound. If they can make a dollar, it goes on the air. Times have changed. Back in the day, you would have never gotten a spot like this on the air... maybe that's a good thing and then again, maybe not."
 
MRBIboredop said:
Folgers is not buying radio, Colgate is not buying radio, insert the name of a brand that was once prominent on the radio here and chances are they are gone.
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Or perhaps they ARE buying radio...just not news and talk formats, which is what we're talking about here.

Listeners demand certain types of programming, presented in a very specific way. The problem is how to pay for it. They also don't like the ways in which stations get the money to pay all of that live & local talent. That's an integral part of the equation. You don't have one without the other.
 
inorm said:
Bonneville's KTAR is NOT ALL News.
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There have been endless discussions about which stations are actually news stations and which are not.

Is WBUR a news station? Because they certainly don't have an anchor reading headlines 24/7, and many listeners and WBUR consider it a news station.

If a Station is news all day, and in the evening have someone "talking about the news", or doing analysis, or commentary (like a NEWSPAPER does)...then, in my mind, and in many listeners minds, it's an all news station.

For some reason people are quick to point out that unless they have a live anchor sitting in a studio reading (repeating) the same headlines 24/7, then it's not a "real" news station.
 
Wimmmex said:
There have been endless discussions about which stations are actually news stations and which are not.

Is WBUR a news station? Because they certainly don't have an anchor reading headlines 24/7, and many listeners and WBUR consider it a news station.

If a Station is news all day, and in the evening have someone "talking about the news", or doing analysis, or commentary (like a NEWSPAPER does)...then, in my mind, and in many listeners minds, it's an all news station.

For some reason people are quick to point out that unless they have a live anchor sitting in a studio reading (repeating) the same headlines 24/7, then it's not a "real" news station.
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That's likely because the industry -- or at least publications covering it -- has format labels of "All News" and "News/Talk."

As for newspapers, there's no other word to describe them, even though nearly all of them have content that isn't news: editorials, comics, sports, columns, puzzles, etc. Even USA Today Sports Weekly, which contains nothing but sports, is considered a newspaper.
 
Wimmmex said:
How would they label WBZ which has 18 hours of newcasts and 5 hours of news analysis?
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News/Talk is what Radio Online calls it, and I agree, especially if the analysis isn't just one person bloviating for five hours but rather a discussion format involving multiple voices.
 
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